Visit Little Rock, new museum

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Heifer International has opened a $7.5
million museum at its Little Rock headquarters to illustrate the
work it does around the world to help impoverished people feed
themselves.

The museum, called Heifer Village, opened in June and will add
an important element to Heifer educational programs, which
demonstrate the charity's mission to provide animals and training
so the world's poor can have sustainable nutrition.

Narrative elements run through the museum's exhibits, showing
the effects that fair trade, clean water or mosquito netting can
have. Under a ceiling of rich, amber-stained wood, natural light
falls on the exhibits as the building itself demonstrates
sustainability strategies.

In a section focusing on education, a visitor can sit at a desk
equipped with a touch-screen computer to go through a variety of
scenarios. The visitor picks from four children who live in
different parts of the world, each of them poor. Going from screen
to screen, the user makes choices that the child might have to
make, for instance, about whether to ask for more food or to see a
doctor.

There are no right or wrong answers, but the user learns more
about the situations faced by poor families and how one decision
leads to making another.

"Each scenario would lead you on a different path," Heifer
Village operations manager Kent Modlin said.

At a nearby stop, patrons can pick items from a grocery basket
and run them over a barcode scanner to learn about sustainable
efforts behind the products.

The museum is interactive from start to finish. Walking in,
visitors see columns that depict different farmers helped by
Heifer, each with panels that slide to reveal various facts.

The exhibit hall has exhibits in five main categories:
infrastructure, health care, fair markets, education and
sustainable agriculture.

Like many contemporary museums geared to young visitors, Heifer
Village has wide-screen TVs, buttons to push and plenty of
information panels. What sets Heifer apart is the way stories
progress as visitors move through its 6,500 square feet.

After the main hall, visitors enter the "Make a Difference Lab"
where they can commit to doing volunteer work, saving energy,
reducing pollution or any number of other efforts. Visitors type
what they plan to do into a computer. A giant computer screen
scrolls the different entries.

While the focus at the museum is not on monetary donations, the
organization says its fundraising has slowed due to the recession
and it recently announced layoffs of 20 percent of its U.S. staff,
68 people. But aid programs overseas will be maintained. Heifer
spokesman Ray White says it takes very little money to provide a
village with animals and training, and to obtain promises that the
offspring of the livestock will be shared with others in the
village.

"Heifer is grass roots on both ends," White said, noting that a
few hundred dollars from small donors in the U.S. have an impact
abroad, providing enough to start a village livestock program.

"The exhibits will show how easy it is for someone to have food
security, to have schools for their children, to have a roof to
keep the rain off of them," White said.

Like the headquarters building itself, the Heifer Village museum
is built of recycled and renewable materials, and uses passive
solar heat and light. Rainfall at the Heifer campus is collected
and flows into a wetland. Visitors to a trail learn how improved
environmental conditions can improve living conditions for a
community.

Last year, Heifer's headquarters received the American Institute
of Architects' highest honor for its ecologically minded
design.

The main building is curved and the new museum is also, fitting
into a scheme of circles and semicircles across the grounds. Amid
the immaculate landscaping are native plants and trees, including
bamboo, yellow coneflowers and dogwoods.

The design projects a unity, which is within Heifer's
message.

"Heifer Village is an attempt to bring more of that story to
people who will help us end hunger and poverty," White said.

"It's not so much about hunger and poverty as it is about the
solution."

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